Lessons of Darkness

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007): C

Mike Nichols’ stagy direction and Aaron Sorkin’s talkative writing join forces for stilted War on Terror-related dramedy with Charlie Wilson’s War, a based-on-true-life tale about the East Texas senator, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), who almost single-handedly spearheaded American funding of Afghan rebels in their 1980s conflict against the invading Soviets. Nichols’ primary focus is comedy, and his material occasionally hits upon some mild joviality thanks to Hanks’ endearingly smarmy performance as the boozing, womanizing ne’er-do-well Wilson (a kindred spirit of Primary Colors' Bill Clinton-ish Jack Stanton) and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s massive scenery chewing as Wilson’s accomplice, straight-shooting CIA agent Gust Avrakotos. However, despite a brisk pace, Nichols’ helming feels either stiff or overly cute – or both, such as during a scene in which two different parties take turns entering Wilson’s office through different doors – while Sorkin’s script stuffs every character’s mouth with the same style of erudite, rapid-fire insider jargon that made his West Wing such a chore. Julia Roberts coasts on her movie star smile and her trim bikinied bod as the religious Republican power player who helps spur Charlie to undertake his Cold War mission. Yet neither she nor her illustrious co-stars can compensate for a facile screenplay without many laughs or insights into our government’s inner workings, nor a tacked-on, weakly argued, thoroughly pedantic coda (and redundant text postscript) that – via its insinuation that we have only ourselves to blame for Osama Bin Laden and 9/11 – reveals the turgid lecture lurking just beneath the film’s good-humored façade.

2007: Year in Film

Another film year is over, meaning it's once again time to start picking favorites. And over at Slant magazine, Ed Gonzalez and I have done just that, via our respective top ten lists as well as some random (and, hopefully, humorous) thoughts on the past twelve months' worth of movies. Enjoy.

2007: Year in Film (Slant magazine)

There Will Be Greatness

Today, I offer my review of the film I consider to be 2007's finest: Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

Links to other, far less positive write-ups are also included.

There Will Be Blood (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
I Am Legend (Slant magazine)
The Great Debaters (Slant magazine)
A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (Slant magazine)
The Singing Revolution (Slant magazine)

End-of-Year Appetizer

My various year-end features should be done by this Friday, but in the meantime, here's something to whet your appetite - a best-of list for IFC News, in which I nominate my choices for the Directors Who Shifted Gears for the Better in 2007.

2007: Five Directors Who Shifted Gears for the Better (IFC News)

Atonement (2007): C+

Stately and majestic but in a decidedly lackluster way, Joe Wright’s Atonement is a lushly shot, proficiently performed, and largely stultifying period piece that invites only mild, detached admiration. Based on Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel (which I have not read), Wright’s film concerns the 1935 affair between wealthy Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and the son of her household’s maid, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), a relationship torn asunder by Cecilia’s younger sister, aspiring writer Briony (Saoirse Ronan). Briony, a creator of fictions, concocts a dastardly lie that banishes Robbie from Cecilia’s arms and, eventually, straight into WWII, where the story – after an effectively intriguing, if somewhat arid, set-up – soon flounders. Pivoting around Wright’s hollow, look-at-me extended tracking shot along the soldier-populated shores of Dunkirk, Robbie’s military service is the film’s most dreary, sterile sequence, though just about everything here has been carefully polished to within an inch of its existence. Knightley and McAvoy’s turns are heartfelt yet colorless, in part because Wright (Pride & Prejudice) spends so much effort cultivating a grand scope and atmosphere that he neglects to properly humanize the plight of his protagonists or piercingly convey his material’s focus on the way art helps us grapple with life. The central romantic tragedy, and older Briony’s (Romola Garai) tortured attempts to make reparations for her crime, are dutifully depicted but missing that vital spark of thorny, fervent, wild emotion, eventually leaving Atonement a would-be epic that feels as if it were trapped under a pane of glass.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007): B+

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is yet another in a recent string of quirky subculture documentaries, yet part of what distinguishes this non-fiction film from its brethren is a story brimming with I-can’t-believe-they’re-real people straight out of a cheesy Hollywood underdog story. Seth Gordon’s doc charts the battle for Donkey Kong’s all-time high score between legendary arcade game maestro Billy Mitchell and budding challenger Steve Wiebe, a conflict that – thanks to hot sauce magnate Mitchell’s repugnant egotism, and family man Wiebe’s modest decency – effortlessly plays out as one between good and evil. Though the videogame milieu Gordon depicts is inherently kinda dorky, he treats it with good-humored respect, while sympathetically pinpointing Wiebe’s Donkey Kong quest as being driven by a desire to both live up to personal expectations and to receive deserved recognition for his accomplishments. King of Kong benefits immeasurably from a cast of colorful supporting players (including a shifty apprentice/lackey to Mitchell), as well as a taut narrative that builds to a surprisingly tense climax. But what ultimately elevates Gordon’s feature above mere cute curiosity piece is the way in which Mitchell and Wiebe’s story eventually provides insights not only into the importance of games in our lives and the universal desire for credit where credit is due, but also into the values that are rewarded and respected in our contemporary culture.

December Crush

As the recent wave of blog-specific reviews has made clear, I've been busy these past few weeks catching up on notable 2007 releases. And while more of those are on their way - including for King of Kong, Atonement, Margot at the Wedding, and La Vie En Rose - I've also been extremely busy churning out criticism for Slant magazine. Consequently, here's a giant batch of links, with a few more big Slant reviews (including one for my film of the year) coming soon...

Now:
The Golden Compass (Slant magazine)
Grace is Gone (Slant magazine)
The Walker (Slant magazine)
Revolver (Slant magazine)
'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris (Slant magazine)
The Sasquatch Gang (Slant magazine)
Be My Oswald (Slant magazine)

The Near Future:
Youth Without Youth (Slant magazine)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Slant magazine)
The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Slant magazine)
Steep (Slant magazine)
Look (Slant magazine)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007): B

In both conception and execution, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the perfect marriage of artist and material. Burton’s cinematic adaptation of Steven Sondheim’s famously gruesome musical is coated in ghostly pale shades punctuated by flashes of rotting yellow-green, a Sleepy Hollow-ish pallor complemented by imaginatively morose set and costume design that help lend the gory story an atmosphere of tomblike ominousness. As the titular demon barber intent on wreaking vengeance on the London judge (Alan Rickman) who exiled him to far-off shores in order to steal his beautiful wife and daughter, Johnny Depp flashes a possessed glint in his eyes and sports a masculine version of the Bride of Frankenstein’s white line-streaked black ‘do. His Todd’s insane plot is facilitated by his murderous partner-in-crime Mrs. Lovett (a magnificent Helena Bonham Carter, looking like a living Quay Brothers doll), whose demented love for Todd is manifest in her use of his victims as ingredients for her shop’s meat pies. There’s almost nothing overtly wrong with Burton’s treatment, from the vocally limited Depp and Bonham Carter’s rock ‘n roll-style singing, to Sacha Baron Cohen’s amusingly over-the-top charlatan Signor Adolfo Pirelli, to its depiction of Todd’s perverse obsessiveness, to a descent-into-hell finale that’s truly grand (or Grand Guignol, as it were). Yet there’s nonetheless something missing from the film, its somewhat static staging of certain musical numbers – such as “A Little Priest,” in which Depp and Bonham Carter do little other than stand around and stare out the window – and the narrative’s general lack of action contributing to a mild torpor that prevents the proceedings from ever truly exploding with malevolent fervor. Proficient and estimable in almost every way, Sweeney Todd is deliriously bloody but never truly gets one’s blood pumping.

The Brave One (2007): C

Jodie Foster takes back the night as a proto-feminist Batman in The Brave One, a revenge fantasy by Neil Jordan in which Foster’s Erica Bain goes all vigilante on Manhattan’s male cretins after a trio of street thugs beat her senseless and murder her fiancé (Naveen Andrews) during a nighttime stroll through Central Park. This initial attack vaguely evokes the Central Park jogger case, while Erica’s later slaying of two African-American hoods on the subway recalls the Bernard Getz shooting, but such allusions don’t mean that Jordan’s film has anything thought-provoking to say about vengeful impulses. Erica is aided in her transformation from a quiet public radio show host into the wrath of God by a series of thoroughly contrived encounters, as the born-again badass more or less stumbles upon different variations of wretched degenerates (abusive husband, gang-banger, pimp, white-collar gangster) every time she steps out of the front door and into the city streets she knows so well. Jordan tilts his camera whenever Erica’s mental state gets a little wonky, a bit of aesthetic clunkiness to match his bumbling treatment of his protagonist’s rage, which the film presents as burdensome but nonetheless wholly righteous, regardless of the gotta-follow-the-law opinions espoused by Terrence Howard’s straight-and-narrow – but nonetheless eerily similar to Erica – detective. Foster’s hard, stern visage and her character’s narration about the “stranger” she’s become strive to provide a commentary on the personal toll of exacting retribution. Yet full of stacked-deck plotting and a finale that more or less extols Erica’s actions, The Brave One really proves just a more superficially sober version of Death Wish.

Useless (2007): B+

Useless finds Jia Zhangke operating in something of a hybrid style, partaking in both non-fiction and fictional filmic modes for his three-part examination of China’s garment industry. It’s a line of attack at once entrancing and frustrating, as Jia’s humanistic opening documentary segment and touching semi-dramatic third portion bookend a middle verité section that never quite meshes with the surrounding material. The film begins with a tracking shot of workers in a clothing factory, with Jia’s empathetic close-ups – thanks to Yu Lik Wai’s masterful HD cinematography – grounding the film’s portrait in individual experience. The laborers toil, eat, and visit the company doctor, routine events that are soon juxtaposed with designer Ma Ke, who laments China’s industrialization while readying a line of garments that integrates notions of history, nationalism and man’s relationship to the Earth. Jia, as usual, is interested in investigating the effects of modernization on contemporary human life. Yet Ma Ke’s thoughts on the subject, as well as the public debut of her fashions in Paris, are treated with muted respect that leaves one with only a vague impression of how Jia truly feels about her work’s attempts to address (and redress) some of the effects of the manufacturing business. Fortunately, though, the director regains his footing during the final half hour, detailing the daily travails of a small community’s tailors via a blend of real and staged incidents that capture, with piercing authenticity and stunning grace, the multifaceted relationship we share with our clothes.

(2007 New York Film Festival)